When a museum exhibition ends, all we’re left with are memories.
Well, that and a catalogue.
Museum exhibitions are collaborative projects, culminations of the work of many people with a variety of skills: Continue reading
This is the text of a talk I gave during the Soundscapes Late event at the National Gallery in London on 4 September, 2015. You can also download and listen to a recording of the talk on my SoundCloud page. Continue reading
A year ago, I wrote a post about 3-D printing and its impact on cultural heritage in the museum world. Last week, I presented an expanded version of the essay as a paper at the tenth annual Arts in Society conference at Imperial College London.
You can now read the paper on Academia.edu.
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
It was misting as I walked past the fountains in Trafalgar Square: white noise, grey day. Moments before, I had woven a curving path through the Square, noticing where the sound of the fountain became blocked by the base of Nelson’s Column. This time it was a consistent swish, a rising and falling as I approached and then passed: a fade in/fade out. A turn of a dial. Continue reading
The resonance begins outside. Continue reading
A new essay of mine entitled “Listening to Karanis: The Mer-Wer Remix Project” has just been published in the new exhibition catalogue Karanis Revealed: Discovering the Past and Present of a Michigan Excavation in Egypt, which documents an exhibition at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology at the University of Michigan. Continue reading
Egypt’s current Antiquities Minister Mohamed Ibrahim is planning to file a formal complaint with UNESCO, declaring that a replica of the Sphinx built at a recently opened Chinese amusement park “harms Egypt’s cultural heritage.” The life-sized Chinese Sphinx replica was completed in April 2014, but judging by a photo of it, I would be hard pressed to call it an exact replica of the original. It’s close enough, however, to have angered the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities. There appears to be no evidence of the Chinese attempting to pass off their Sphinx as the original, particularly since it sits within an amusement park instead of a pyramid complex, thereby cut off from any of the cultural context that would usually give the Sphinx its meaning.
Or is it? Continue reading
This essay was commissioned by Meri Kytö and originally published in the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology News Quarterly’s Research and Projects column (v.11 n.1, Jan-Mar 2014).
Museums, although thought of as silent spaces, can be surprisingly noisy when listened to attentively. A large portion of my practice as an artist involves listening to museums, where the sonic collisions between present and past create what I have previously referred to as the active sounds of history (Kannenberg 2012, 8). While I am not suggesting we can listen to the past directly by looking at objects, I believe that contemporary sounds in museum spaces are experientially charged and transformed by their physical contact with the tangible cultural heritage of the past. This transformation is in part reliant upon the accepted authenticity of museum objects: Continue reading
Museums need mission statements, not so much as codes to be followed but as a shorthand method for self-identification, setting the tone by which a collecting institution makes decisions. As I continue to put together an article proposing a concrete plan for a Museum of Sound, its mission statement will hopefully be seen as a through-line weaving through the ideas the article will address. Here’s my first draft.
“The Museum of Sound is dedicated to the collection, preservation, and presentation of sounds as cultural objects. Employing a holistic approach to the experience of sound in diverse contexts coupled with innovative gallery design, we encourage our visitors to engage in contemplative listening that creates an awareness of sound’s importance in everyday life across historical, geographical, cultural, and natural borders.”
Copyright ©2013 John Kannenberg and may not be reproduced or otherwise used without permission.
This essay was commissioned by Cheryl Tipp, curator of sound at the British Library. Illustrated with photographs and sound clips, it was originally published 30 August 2013 on the British Library’s Sound and Vision blog. I’m reproducing it here with a few minor edits I should have caught the first time around.
Memory is at the heart of much human activity. Memory drives us to collect, to record, to create documents –”information or evidence that serves as an official record” – that we then spend a lot of time and effort preserving. Some of these documents are strictly personal and kept as family heirlooms. Others end up being judged by someone else as having a broader significance, and end up being preserved in places like museums and libraries in order that they be made accessible to a wider audience. There are countless institutions around the world whose mission statements may not explicitly express it, but which are essentially dedicated to honoring the human desire to remember. Continue reading
Phonomnesis 
